How would one go about making a site like this..?

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1

Hey guys! This is my first post so…here goes!
I was thinking about making a site where people can go on it and leave their reviews and reccomendations for video games. My question is, how would one go about putting up the games for the site? There are a lot of video games out there…so would i have to manually put each game into a database and manually make a page for each game, or is there an easier way?

2

Probably the easiest way would be via something like a CSV file.

So you could create your game list in Excel, export it as a CSV file and then import that CSV file to populate the database. Although your site would need to either be built to support that (and know how to handle each entry) or the platform you use support it (and you write the CSV file to the standards used in that platform).

What you describe probably isn’t a hard site to develop though.

3

Ah okay! thanks!i’ve never done that before but i have heard of doing something like that. What do you mean when you say my site will need to be built for the platform used to supposrt it? Only certain servers would let you do the CSV thing? And there would be no other way but for me to populate the Excel spreadsheet myself manually, correct?

4

I mean’t the application itself.

So if you are building the site yourself from scratch (or using a framework like CodeIgniter) then your CMS will need to be able to read the CSV file and know what to do with the contents. It isn’t hard but you would need to code the CSV import (say in PHP) and parse it (read each entry, check and insert into the DB).

Or if you were using a commercial or open source CMS you’d need to make sure your CSV was written in a format that is understood by the CMS’s CSV category importer (assuming a game would effectively be a category) - or article; or however you are using to represent the game.

Does that make sense?

5

ah okay. Yes i understand. I don’t use any cms, i just handcode everything myself (for the practice of it.)

6

OK, if thats the case you’ll need to read up on how to upload and read a CSV file; and how to process that into the database.

So lets say you have a database table of games, which contains a unique id, name, hook (for friendly url’s), description, release date, cover image, publisher

Your CSV file would contain a record for each game, with that info above in it.

If you want to insert, when you read the CSV file on upload, you’d check the DB table to see if an entry already exists, if it doesn’t then insert it, if it does check for changes and update or ignore.

You could also maintain the CSV and check for games being removed from the CSV file and delete any from the DB that have been removed.

7

Alright, thanks for the help! One last question: would i have to populate the Excel spreadsheet myself manually, or is there an easier way to import the data like some sort of feed or something?

8

hmm thats a more complicated… depends whether the data is available and how it is available. You might have to do it manually

9

alright, thanks for the info! I really appriciate it!